-- NVIDIA's first foray into the Android tablet space left a bit to be desired. Sure, the Tegra Note 7 has a speedy processor, support for digital pen input, and a low starting price of $199. But it also has a 7 inch, 1280 x 800 pixel display, which feels so 2012.

It looks like that could change when tablets based on the company's new Tegra 1 chips hit the streets.

NVIDIA has been showing off demos of its Tegra K1 chip handling complex graphics calculations this week. But it looks like the company is also providing details for a Tegra K1 reference tablet to potential partners.

There are plenty of other tablets with high-resolution displays on the market at the moment, but the increased screen resolution would be a big jump from the 1280 x 800 pixel screen in the current crop of Tegra Note 7 tablets.

Interestingly, NVIDIA's new reference design uses the same case as the Tegra Note 7, suggesting that the company's new chips offer higher performance without generating significantly more heat or taking up more space.

If tablets with the K1 chip hit the streets soon they could also be among the first devices with ARM-based chips and 4GB of memory.

-- NVIDIA describes its next-generation mobile processor as a 192-core chip. But only 2 to 4 cores in an NVIDIA Tegra K1 chip are actually ARM CPU cores. Most of the cores NVIDIA is talking about deal with graphics processing, borrowing technology from the Kepler graphics architecture NVIDIA had already developer for desktop and laptop computers.

So it makes sense that in order to show what the Tegra K1 can do, NVIDIA put together a few graphics demos.

In technical terms, the Tegra K1 graphics chip can handle DirectX 11 and OpenGL graphics, and the developers at Epic Games are bringing the Unreal Engine to mobile with the help of the Tegra K1.

NVIDIA is working on two versions of the chip, one based on a 2.3 GHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A15 32-bit CPU and a second with a custom 2.5 GHz dual-core 64-bit CPU. They'll both have 192 graphics cores with support for NVIDIA's CUDA parallel processing platform. And they'll both support 4K display resolutions.